One of the more annoying things about Netflix, Hulu Plus, and Amazon's television streaming libraries is the vast difference between the selection available. It would be almost impossible to get a thorough idea of who has the better library without searching for hundreds of TV shows on each service and comparing them manually. So we did just that.

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We all have our own impression of what kind of selection different companies have, but we wanted to get a clearer picture. To do that, we searched for 250 shows on Netflix, Hulu Plus, and Amazon Prime to see who has the best selection available for their respective paid subscription services. Just for kicks, we also threw in Amazon, iTunes, and Google Play's selection of shows you can buy as well.

Methodology

Getting a complete representation of everything that the various streaming services have to offer would be an undertaking too huge and too dense to be useful. In order to get a useful glimpse into the different libraries, here's what we did:

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We counted IMDb's top 250 TV shows by MOVIEmeter rank. IMDb ranks movies and TV shows based on a scale called MOVIEmeter, which measures how much people are searching for and interacting with certain titles (regardless of ratings, reviews, or recency). The full list can be found here. We gathered the top 250 shows according to this list to represent the shows most people are interested in, irrespective of demographic.

We included partial seasons in the count. Some shows are currently airing and new episodes arrive regularly. Other services may get licenses to show half of a season. If a service has six full seasons and part of the seventh season available, we counted it as seven seasons. We did not count "best of" episode packs or holiday specials where applicable.

We gave Hulu Plus special "Recent Episode" designations. While Hulu Plus offers a similar service to Netflix and Amazon Prime, it's also the only service surveyed that offers to carry a rotating collection of the last few episodes of a show, or the entire recent season. These were counted as either the "Recent Season" or "Recent Episodes" designation, depending on the licensing scheme.

We did not count shows hosted on network sites. Most networks including CBS, HGTV, Adult Swim, Fox, AMC, HBO, Showtime, and dozens more offer full episodes of shows on their own web sites (sometimes for a fee). While Hulu is pretty good at finding out if episodes are available on these sites, we did not include that availability in this analysis.

We only looked at US availability. Looking at availability across different services is already pretty complicated, but accounting for differences in international licensing is a mess. Our data only includes US availability, but you may be able to use apps like Hola Unblocker to see content that's available in countries outside your own.

With this in mind, here's what we found:

While we collected far more than just 25 shows, unfortunately showing them all would create a graphic that's just a little bit too big to be useful. This data was collected on the weekend of February 22 and 23rd, and will probably have changed by the time you read this.

Conclusions

With the data collected, we can learn a few things about how the different services stack up.

Netflix is the Undisputed TV Streaming King

Setting aside that Netflix is breaking new ground and winning awards with its streaming-only shows like House of Cards, Netflix has more than twice as many shows available to stream as Amazon Prime (122 shows vs 58 out of 250). Not only did Netflix have more than Amazon, it had just shy of half of all the shows surveyed (48.8%). So, unless you're looking for something obscure or extremely old, you've got roughly a coin-flip's chance of finding it on Netflix.

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On top of that, it has more shows that Hulu Plus and Amazon don't carry. Netflix had 54 exclusive shows (among streaming services surveyed) versus only 17 that were exclusive to Amazon. This includes big-name shows like Breaking Bad or The Walking Dead, which you can purchase on Amazon, but not stream with a Prime subscription. In other words, even if you already pay for Prime, a Netflix subscription might be worth it.

Hulu Corners the Market on New Content

The one thing Netflix and Amazon both falter at is recent shows. There's almost always a several month long delay between a season wrapping up and its arrival on streaming services. This is where Hulu Plus picks up the slack. Hulu Plus had 92 of the 250 shows surveyed. However, only 40 of them included backlogs of older seasons. 52 of the shows Hulu Plus carried were either the most recent season or a rotating set of the most recent few episodes of a show. In other words, you can use Netflix to catch up on the first four seasons, but for the fifth season that's currently airing on TV? Hit up Hulu Plus.

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It's also worth pointing out that, while there are a ton of shows Hulu Plus does not carry natively (only 36.8% of the shows we checked were on Hulu Plus at all), the service is pretty good at indexing other sites that also have full episodes. It won't redirect you to direct competitors like Netflix, but it can act as a search engine for places like CBS, AMC, or HBO that have episodes available on their own sites or services. At least in that sense, Hulu is worth checking out when you want to find shows. Just keep in mind that once you leave Hulu, you're at the mercy of the content providers themselves. Hulu returning results for HBO shows doesn't mean that you can play them on a device that supports Hulu. That's just Hulu's way of helping you find where to look next.

Streaming Selection Still Doesn't Hold a Candle to Purchasing Shows

While the bulk of this survey was aimed at comparing streaming libraries, we'd be remiss if we didn't look at content you can buy as well. Amazon, Google Play, and iTunes all allow users to buy individual episodes or whole seasons of television shows and get unlimited access to them. Google's selection included 170 of the 250 shows or 68% of all shows we checked. Amazon and iTunes, however, had a full 226 out of 250 or 90.4% of surveyed shows available for purchase.

The implication of this finding is pretty clear: if you want to watch TV shows on the internet, most content providers will be happy to oblige. For a price. Now, some of us could probably refinance a home with the amount of cash we might spend trying to buy seasons for all the shows we watch, but if you're really desperate to watch a show and it's not available anywhere else, there is the option. At the very least, all three services are pretty good about allowing you to buy new episodes as they come out. So, there's that.

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At the end of the day, this is just a glimpse into the average use case. I can think of a handful of shows I like to watch that weren't even high enough on the IMDb list (MST3K anyone?). Even if Netflix has Amazon beat in the numbers, you might have all you need with Amazon. The best thing you can do is grab your five or ten favorite shows and check them out for yourself.